The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

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By Kyle O'Brien, Creative Works Editor

September 20, 2016 | 3 min read

The Olympics in Rio this year gave fuel for advertisers to continue their campaigns into the Paralympics, and those who did scored big on the Brand Agility Index by PR firm WE Communications.

WE marked every time global brands were mentioned to create the BAI. The three top-scoring sponsors for the Paralympics, including pre-event mentions, were Samsung, Visa and P&G.

The Brand Agility Index is compiled by ranking brands out of five in areas including a campaign’s scalability, relevance, the speed in which it responds on social media, engagement, originality, personalization and sentiment. WE analyzed all conversations and engagement levels from brands across news, blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

The winning brands were able to score highly across all of the parameters, featuring original content and stories that stood out, drove high sentiment, received plenty of social engagement and were able to adapt their stories to the event.

Many of the main sponsors extended their campaigns from the Olympics to the Paralympics. Coca-Cola, Nissan, P&G and Samsung all did well moving their campaigns forward, even knowing that the Paralympics don’t have nearly the following of the Summer Olympics. Nissan’s #DoItForUs continued to receive positive engagement, as did Coca-Cola’s #ThatsGold. P&Gs “Thank You Mum” campaign appeared to receive much more positive engagement than it did in the Olympics, too.

Samsung’s “School of Rio” ads made it a standout sponsor for the Paralympics. The campaign was well adapted, incorporating Paralympic athletes and adding elements of humor. Their athlete blogger campaign – which called for athletes to tell their stories through their eyes and their Samsung devices, resulted in audiences being taken on an authentic journey with the athletes.

WE noted that an element lacking with the top three brands was personalizing their content for its use. There wasn’t a big effort to make content Paralympics-relevant, and they were essentially just extensions of their already used Olympics campaigns.

BP and GE both had positive starts at the Paralympics, with strong positioning messages, but nothing that built a story as the event progressed, noted WE in its wrap-up of the event.

Pre-Paralympics content pushed out by brands at first appeared to be reinvigorated, with GE leading with infrastructure support messages, Atos cementing its role at the Paralympics and BP introducing an #EnergyWithin aspirational campaign.

According to WE, as the weeks went by, messages from brands appeared to go off course, losing sight of what their communications objective for the Paralympics were, with much less content being pushed.

Samsung and Nissan were the most consistent with their messages. Samsung’s School of Rio ad series was highly favored by audiences for the authenticity of each ad. Nissan’s #DoItForUs and Team GB prank videos, which were reworked for the Paralympics also continued to remain crowd pleasers.

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